Oxylabs, the Vilnius-based web-scraping and proxy-network provider founded in 2015, has taken its first check from outside investors: $130M from Warburg Pincus’s Capital Solutions Founders Fund at a $3.6bn valuation, according to FinSMEs and The Recursive, both reporting on the July 2026 deal. CEO Vytautas Savickas frames the round not as a rescue but as a bet on “agentic web search infrastructure” — the pipes that let AI agents fetch live web pages rather than query a static index.
The numbers matter here because they invert the usual venture logic. Per The Recursive, Oxylabs reached €305.8M ($350M) in annual recurring revenue and grew past 2,000 employees and 350,000 customers entirely on its own cash, as the second bootstrapped unicorn to come out of Lithuanian startup-builder Tesonet, after Nord Security. That’s not a company buying runway to reach product-market fit — CFO Jurgis Gabrielius Rudgalvis’s own framing of the ARR figure is essentially a receipt proving the business didn’t need the money. What changed is the market opportunity: LLM vendors and agent builders now need continuous, structured access to a web that increasingly blocks bots, and that’s a different sales motion than the e-commerce price-monitoring and market-research use cases that built Oxylabs’ base.
A profitable decade-old bootstrap taking its first check isn’t a distress signal — it’s a company repricing itself around a new buyer: AI agents that need to browse the live web on someone else’s infrastructure.
What the check doesn’t resolve
Proxy and scraping infrastructure has always sat in a legal gray zone — IP rotation, CAPTCHA-solving, and geo-restriction bypass are the product, and courts and platform operators have periodically pushed back on exactly those techniques industry-wide. None of that appears to have slowed Oxylabs’ growth, but a valuation built partly on “agentic web search infrastructure” is also a bet that scraping-based data access stays legally viable as the customer base shifts from marketing analysts to autonomous agents acting at machine speed and volume. Warburg Pincus’s structure — a minority check through a dedicated founders-fund vehicle, rather than a control buyout — suggests the firm is underwriting Savickas’s existing playbook rather than looking to reshape it.
Worth watching: whether Oxylabs discloses how much of that $350M ARR now comes from AI-agent and LLM-training customers versus its legacy e-commerce and cybersecurity base, what acquisitions the new capital funds, and whether rival scraping and proxy providers follow with their own first outside rounds now that AI-driven demand has made bootstrapped profitability look like leverage rather than caution.
"With Warburg Pincus, we will build on our lead in agentic web search infrastructure and product development, while continuing to execute our long-term strategy," Savickas concluded.
— Sifted
